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SALT LAKE CITY -- Have you ever given your child an old cell phone to play with as a toy? 911 dispatchers say that's not a good idea. They say their lines are getting jammed with calls from kids whose parents have given them their old phones.
You may think that if you've stopped the service, you're not paying a bill and your child can't make a phone call. The problem is even if there's no service, many cell phones will still dial 911.
When kids are happily playing in the park, you probably won't see them playing with a cell phone. So while the kids were busy, we asked some parents if they've ever given their old cell phone to a child.
"When my son was young, it was just a toy," Howard Haupt said.
Jenn Huey told us, "Rather than having them play with mine, it's just easier to give them the old one."
"[It] made him fell grown-up," Howard Haupt said. "Punch some numbers in, pretend he's calling a friend."
The problem is if the that child punches in 911, it's not a pretend phone call anymore.
"Parents don't realize the importance of what happens when they give their kids their cell phones," said Heidi Johnson, with Pleasant Grove dispatch.
Even cell phones with no service will still dial and connect 911 calls. Dispatchers across the valley have complained about a jam of calls, all by kids, likely not even aware they're calling.
"One of our dispatchers, a couple of weeks ago, had somebody that had one and she got 25 to 30 phone calls in just a couple hours, where this person kept calling and calling and calling," Johnson said.
It's a problem because dispatchers have to take every call seriously.
"We don't know if it's a real emergency or not," Johnson said.
On out-of-use cell phones the call-back number doesn't always come up, and it's hard to track where that call is coming from if the service has been disconnected.
"It takes time to follow up on them and try to find the person, where there might be something critical going on that needs our attention more than this call," Johnson said.
"I didn't think of that as a potential issue, but I can definitely see that it could be," Haupt said.
Johnson says, its OK to give your child an old phone to play with, just take out the battery. And if your phone has a removable SIM card, take that out too.
If dispatch was able to track a caller who made repeated 911 calls, and found they had been abusing the system, they can be charged with communications abuse.
E-mail: abutterfield@ksl.com
